“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness so that the man of God maybe thoroughly equipped for every good work.” – 2 Timothy 3:16
What some well-known people had to say about the Bible:
“I believe that the only way to understand any given passage in the Word of God is to take the whole Bible and place the point of it, like an inverted pyramid on that passage, so that the weight of the entire word rests upon a single verse or indeed, a single word.” – Donald Grey Barnhouse
“It takes the Holy Spirit to make us docile to the Bible . . . to give us the discipline to study and the humnility to accept the truth we find without twisting it.” – John Piper
“It ain’t those parts of the Bible that I can’t understandthat bother me, it is the parts that I do understand. –Mark Twain
“Do not try to imagine God or you will have an imaginary God.” – A. W. Tozer
There are:
66 Books (39 Old Testament and 27 NT)
Written by more than 30 people
Among its authors were a tax collector, a herdsman, a doctor, a doctor, some fishermen, a philosopher, a preacher, some prophets, a statesman, a king and a rabbi.
Written over a period of about 1,500 years
It has 30, 442 verses.
Isaiah 66 chapters (96 pages) (Longest Book)
Palsm 150 154 pages
Obadiah 1 chapter only (21 verse) (Shortest Book)
Jude 25 verse
Shortest Verse “Jesus wept”.
Shortest Prayer in the Bible “Lord, save me!” (Matthew 14:30)
Shortest chapter Psalm 117
GOSPEL
There is only one gospel, on which all the apostles agreed (1 Cor. 15:11), and Paul could call down the curse of God upon anybody – including himself – who preached a “different” gospel from the original apostolic gospel of God’s grace (Gal. 1:6-8). Yet the apostles expressed this one gospel in various ways –
Now sacrificial – the shedding and sprinkling of Christ’s blood
Now messianic – the breaking in of God’s promised rule
Now legal – the Judge pronouncing the unrighteous righteous
Now personal – the Father reconciling his wayward children
Now salvific – the heavenly Liberator coming to rescue the helpless
Now cosmic – the universal Lord claiming universal dominion.
More general facts here for your interest:
* It’s the best-selling book year after year.
* It’s been translated into 1200 languages.
* The Bible has 1,189 chapters.
* It has 31,173 verses.
* It has 773,692 words.
* It has 3,566,480 letters.
* The longest word in the Bible is MAHERSHALALHASBAZ.
*The word “and” is found 46,277 times in the Bible.
* The word “reverend” appears only once in the Bible.
* The oldest man recorded in the Bible was METHUSELAH (969 years-old).
*In America, 168,000 Bibles are being given or sold everyday.
* The Bible can be read aloud in 70 hours.
* King Solomon had 700 wives & 300 concubines.
* There are no cats mentioned in the Bible.
* All dogs go to Heaven.
* The Garden of Eden was in Iraq.
* The Bible described the dinosaurs in Job 39 -41.
* The shortest mentioned in the Bible was BILBAD in Job 8:1.
* The Bible was the first printed book.
The Bible has influenced billions of lives forever!
We are living in a time when the question of being personally attended to seems such a rare treat. The old adage of consumer being king is no longer fashionably true. Gone are the days when your pint of milk was delivered to your doorstep or your personal physician making house calls. The worst is being attended to by electronic recording over the phone. Everything is so impersonal. In time we are likely to be replaced by machines. As it is, the computers and calculating machines are functioning in our place.
In retrospect, the corner store is fast disappearing, engulfed by giant supermarkets. Onto the stage of marketing, online buying and selling is evolving to be part of our daily lives. The most prominent and frustrating aspects of the Internet era will be a world devoid of humans. In highlighting the automated age, its scenario will evidently be:
the phobia of dealing with ghostly machine
the absolute challenge of making contact with the human face or voice
big bucks are channelled towards the objective of making sales rather than helping solving your shopping problem
speaking to a machine programmed to understand human speech
to access information you’ll face the daunting task of punching or typing in a sequence of numbers
the exasperating experience of wearing out your human patience
the frequent endless waiting of being served by a human.
Last Time When – wind screen wiped, water & oil checked, tyre pressure pumped?
As a starter, try calling up your neighbours or friends, and increasingly you’ll get the answering machine. Taking a step further, with large commercial establishments or departments, you’ll be confronted with the labyrinthine menus that accompany most phone-based systems. The maze and impersonal instruction will infuriate your patience and load you with frustration.
Increasingly, it is the phone and the Internet that engender the frustration. Everything is digitised. Sales items are bar-coded. The human brain is increasingly functioning less and less and no doubt robots will replace humans. You and I must be prepared to be bar-coded or fitted with “smart card” and be treated as mere digitals in this fast changing world.
Last but not least, there is nothing you can label in terms of qualitative & quantitative service with the like of such tradesmen as the electrician, plumber & carpenter. Even the smallest job is measured out by the hour. They’re just minting gold much more than would any professional. Discounting good will & customer relationship, it’s a one-off kill!
Don’t look back to the good old days . . . brave yourself to the GREED of this corrupted world.